The Changing Risks of Exposure to Gun Violence in Chicago

Charles C. Lanfear

Robert J. Sampson

David S. Kirk

Rebecca Bucci

Homicide Rates in Chicago

Questions

 

To what extent were individuals growing up in Chicago in this period exposed to gun violence?

 

And how does this exposure differ…

… by race and sex?

… by neighbourhood context?

… by cohort?

The

Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods

  • 6200 children in 7 birth cohorts
  • 3 interviews from 1995–2002
  • Community surveys in 1995 and 2002

PHDCN+

  • Representative sample of 4 cohorts
  • 1057 interviewed in 2012
  • 682 followed-up in 2021

Timeline

Contexts of Violence

Lifecourse Exposures to Gun Violence

Measures

Has the respondent…

  • ever seen someone else get shot?
    • If so, at what age? (only wave 2)
  • ever been shot?
    • If so, at what age? (waves 2 & 5)

Problem: Interval censoring

Method: Non-parametric MLE (Turnbull 1976)

Seen shot: race/ethnicity

Been shot: race/ethnicity

Seen shot: sex

Been shot: sex

Risk and Protective Factors

Additional Measures

  • Cohort
  • Immigrant generation
  • Childhood neighbourhood context
    • Collective efficacy
    • Disadvantage
    • Homicide rate

Method: Semi-parametric proportional hazards MLE (Anderson-Bergman 2017)

Estimates

Takeaways

  • Being shot occurs later in life than seeing shootings

  • Only Black and Hispanic respondents were shot in adulthood

  • Seeing shootings much less common for white respondents

  • Mainly males are shot, but female respondents witness nearly as many shootings

Appendix

References

Sampson, Kirk, & Bucci. 2022. “Cohort Profile: Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and Its Additions (PHDCN+).” Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology 8.

Turnbull. 1976. “The empirical distribution function with arbitrarily grouped, censored and truncated data.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Methodological) 38(3):290-295.

Anderson-Bergman. 2017. “icenReg: Regression models for interval censored data in R.” Journal of Statistical Software 81(12):1–23.